Robert Rodriguez

Robert Rodriguez was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, USA.  He grew up in Texas as a part of a family of 10 children. Initially rejected from film school, Rodriguez taught himself the basic editing and directing skills before attending a film program. His first feature, El Mariachi, showed his talents as a filmmaker and helped land a deal with Columbia Pictures. His later films include From Dusk to Dawn.

He made his first feature film El Mariachi on a very tight or small budget of only on seven thousand dollars. Some of the money came from his work as a human guinea pig to test a new medication. Playing on Mexican and American western themes, the Spanish-language action movie centered on a wandering musician who gets caught up with some bad guys after switching guitar cases with a hit man who uses a similar case to carry around weapons that he uses.

As El Mariachi demonstrated, he was a talented filmmaker, and it helped him make a deal with Columbia Pictures. His next project was his first major production called Desperado another action film that was yet again a great success. He then brought an element of the supernatural to his southwestern set films with From Dusk to Dawn the story of two brothers that fight vampires together. Then while stuck in a small border town he revisited El Mariachi set area with a second movie called Once Upon A Time in Mexico.

I really liked his 10-minute film videos because they were short and very easy to understand. I liked the way that he could find how to save money and not really spend anything on the production of the movie. The way that he did lighting and camera angles is actually quite interesting. I want to try sometime some of his tips and tricks for myself to see if they are actually easy to do.

Some of the easy things I think that would be neat to try is the lighting and shots. The way that he set up lighting is really neat how he only used 2 little desk lights and makes some really good shots. Like put a lamp far behind me to light up the background then put a lamp on my face to give a good shadow would be neat to try.

Or how he does only a few takes to make a good shot. Like even if you miss something you can keep the good part of it and only have to retake the parts you missed. All in all I think that he is a great filmmaker and his 10-minute videos were really well described.